The
concelebration of a papal Mass is always a sight to behold. There, for the eyes
of the world to see, is the Church as it really, truly exists — the Pope,
lifting up the body and blood of Christ before the altar is surrounded by the
Church’s visible hierarchy of cardinals, bishops and priests in an eternal
posture of worship and adoration, leading the laity to Christ.

It is there, at the sacrifice where
two worlds meet that we gain a glimpse of heaven that can last a lifetime. Like
it or not, the image is one that is ordered, fatherly, hierarchical and fraternal.
These words, despite many college professors’ protestations, properly
understood, are not “dirty” words.

The priestly posture is one not
merely of worship and adoration, but also of protection.

Imagine that someone were to rush
the altar, after the consecration, with the intent of profaning the Eucharist.
Like the sixth-century acolyte St. Tarsicius, who gave his life to protect the
Body of Christ, the priests would instinctively move to protect the Eucharist.

One modern American example of this
took place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Dec. 10, 1989. Dozens of homosexual
activists entered the cathedral with the intention of disrupting Mass. One
activist, receiving the body of Christ from a priest, crumbled the consecrated
host between his fingers and dropped the broken Eucharist on the floor. A
number of priests fell to the floor to pick up the remains.

History is full of examples of the
movement of public bodies of men protecting something sacred. The Church is
both the protector and the sacred thing to be protected. Christ left a body —
the Church — to represent him, and that body is structured in an anticipatory
posture awaiting his return.

That posture is summed up in the
picture of a body of men, consecrated to Jesus Christ in the corporate fraternity
of the priesthood, gathered around thebody, made
manifest in our presence within the Mass.

We have lost sight of the fact that
the Church militant is still engaged in a battle. On the night of his
arrest, Christ ordered that Peter sheath his sword drawn against Roman
soldiers. Christ then went to the cross, and with the sword of salvation, slew
death and descended into hell, mortally wounding Satan. But the battle
still rages and will continue to rage until Christ, the servant King, returns.

Yes, Christ served unto death, but
he’s also a King, and sometimes kings must lead in battle.

In the Old Testament, it was the
priestly tribe, the Levites, who were the leaders and protectors of the
Tabernacle. Today, just as most priests forgo marital love for a deeper love,
Catholic priests are asked not to take directly political roles because they
have a deeper battle to fight.

Eschatologically, the Church is
assembled and waiting for that final battle. It’s a fight that doesn’t depend
on human strength, but entirely on God. I’ve been blessed to participate in
Masses celebrated by retired, disabled and ailing priests in an infirmary
chapel. Each time, I am struck by how the priestly posture of worship,
adoration and protection is maintained even when age, illness, or infirmity
prevent the priests from assuming that posture physically.

Anthropology of the Priesthood

We live in an age where the image of
male friendship has been stained to such an extent by the media-saturated
example of male-male love that any time we speak of two men’s affection for
each other, we think of the disorder rather than the proper order of things.

The anthropology of the priesthood,
however, is an anthropology of rightly ordered male communion.

Whenever Catholics gather to
remember (“Do this in remembrance of me”) the central event of salvation
history, they are gathered by a male in the priestly fraternity — men who have
sacrificed both marriage and children to give witness to the truth that eternal
life comes from sacramental union with Christ.

They forgo marriage to better carry
out their, or rather, Christ’s mission. Even in the Eastern Church, which
allows married men to become priests, married priests may not become bishops.

“The brotherhood” so often spoken of
by St. Paul is the deepest expression of a rightly-ordered way for men to love
one another — not in homoerotic selfishness, but in a life-giving reflection of
the One who established fraternity.

The Mystery of Paternity

We cannot fully understand the
mystery of the priesthood because it is a new reality instituted and centered
around Christ himself. It’s difficult to receive this truth when we’ve
deliberately set up a culture that questions any authority, especially male
authority, and associates all paternity with the patriarchy that had to be
overcome — a problem peculiar to the last 50 years.

“Authority ... obedience: To be
frank, these are not easy words to speak nowadays,” said Pope Benedict XVI
during the Mass at Yankee Stadium on April 20, 2008. “Words like these
represent a ‘stumbling stone’ for many of our contemporaries. … Yet, in the
light of our faith in Jesus Christ … we come to see the fullest meaning, value,
and indeed beauty, of those words.”

The same can be said of the word
“patriarchy.” Our discomfort with some forms of cultural patriarchy has made us
hesitant to even use the word. Yet, that is a reality connected to this world,
not the next.

We’ve lost the capacity to see that
ecclesial patriarchy — or priestly “fatherhood” — is a reflection of a natural
good. The Church, through its order, is teaching the world a truth that it
cannot recognize.

Christ built the Church upon a body
of men who entered into a new relationship the evening of the Last Supper. Like
the Trinity, the hierarchy is a relationship of persons. The ecclesial
hierarchy is made up of the pope, bishops, and priests centered on Christ.

We, as Christians, gain access to
the life of the Trinity through the sacraments and the priesthood. By so doing,
we are connected to a family of unfathomable size — fellow Catholics worldwide
throughout time and space, both living and dead. Through worship, the
priesthood makes Christ present in the world.

As both Pope John Paul II and Pope
Benedict XVI have said, the male priesthood represents no defect in the
personhood of women, or for that matter, of men who are not priests. The
dignity of the laity is not diminished because we have not been chosen to carry
out the rights and duties and liturgies of the priest. The male fraternity is
not oppressive because it is not an end in itself.

“These ranks cannot belong to every
individual member of the Church, but that certain ones must be appointed to
them by those to whom Our Lord committed such authority,” wrote St. John Fisher
in The Defense of the
Priesthood in 1525.

Rather, the ecclesial hierarchy
excludes many of us in order to save all of us. Liturgy is a work on behalf of
the people. In our civic and cultural life this is depicted when our soldiers
fight for us, or when we cheer for our sports teams. On a much higher level,
priests do this on our behalf through the liturgy.

There is a hierarchy of being — an
order — that’s found in nature, in language, in music, in mathematics, in
relationships and in natural law.

So, why wouldn’t we expect to find
the same within the Church?

“The fact that the Father is not the
Son, and the Son is not the Spirit, means that there is an irreversible order
within the Godhead,” writes Father James Schall in The Order of All Things. “There is an
inner relationship of persons. And one cannot take the place of the other.”

A similar order is found in the
Church as established by Christ. In much the same way, neither can a pope, priest
or bishop take the place of the other.

Fraternity. Hierarchy. Ecclesial
Paternity. We, as Catholics in the new millennium must reclaim and re-propose
these words to a confused world. This is how the Church manifests itself
universally.

The Church lives out its Catholic
character in this way. To deny this is to ignore the truth that martyrs like
St. John Fisher laid down their lives to uphold, and dismiss the truth that
Jesus Christ handed down to us in a particular way the night before he died.